Content marketing is a marketing strategy that’s all about strategically and consistently creating engaging and relevant copywriting, videos, and images. This keeps you top of mind with regular distribution across multiple marketing channels. It furthers your brand, educates, and entertains. The downstream effect is that as people engage with great content, it boosts social media and search engine traffic by feeding the algorithms. Like all the best investments, engagement compounds.
Despite “content marketing” being a modern phrase, it’s a timeless concept. It cannot be better summed up than through the words of Guy de Maupassant, a 19th-century French author and playwright. “The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: ‘Touch my sympathies…Make me laugh…Make me think.'” Perhaps this goes to prove that there is a timeless element to communication, no matter what platform we’re using. How we communicate may change, but the relationship between what we say and how that makes someone feel is constant and sublimely human.
Marketing and all that falls under the umbrella of “content” — email marketing, web design, branding, social media, photos, videos, live streams, copywriting and content calendars for each of these — are intended to communicate a specific message for a specific purpose to a specific target audience. They should be planned, scheduled, and ruthlessly edited. And their effectiveness is in their ability to evoke something from you: first a feeling, then a reaction. It’s all about cause and effect.
When people see or read something that makes them feel an emotion, they are far more likely to act. Emotion-based content marketing performs twice as well as purely rational content—31% of the time compared to only 16%. It doesn’t even have to be big emotions. It can be contentment from peaceful imagery or confidence or trust from something informative that target users care about.
Big emotions have some impressive statistics, though. One study of web traffic estimated that anger-inducing content has a 38% chance of going viral. Personally, our favorite place to lean into big emotions is in the nonprofit sector where impact storytelling that triggers emotions is paramount to activism and donor retention. “Touch my sympathies.”
Omnichannel marketing puts your target audience at the center of the content, not your business or organization. Your business or organization exists because it can fill a need, right? Lean into the people with the needs and their perspective. Speak their language. The content you publish across websites, emails, advertisements, and social media channels must speak to—and with—the humans you want to build a relationship with. It must have a clear point of view, paint a picture or tell a story, and be polished.
Each channel should create a consistent brand experience with clear pathways back to your website or wherever the desired action should happen. How do you ensure this? No one person can possibly have all the skillsets to do the “creative” for multiple marketing channels expertly (we, too, wish unicorns were real). It takes a team to produce great video, expert copywriting, web design compositions that steer a user experience, photographers who really know how to shoot effective, professional images, and a social media manager who is at least mildly obsessed with each algorithm update and engagement data and is also strict about brand guidelines. Good marketing takes a team.
With so much that goes into creating unified content — and with the data that proves that emotional marketing produces better engagement than drier content — the most logical thing you can do for your bottom line is to allocate those same resources to the type of content that will produce the most ROI: emotional content.
We are all humans behind these modern boxes of light. Talk to each other. Answer “the cries of the public,” as Guy de Maupassant described them.
Make them laugh. Make them think. Make them come back for more.
